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NVIDIA were kind enough to ship me a complete system with their reference implementation installed. My extremely poor digicam skills stop me from showing you pics but the spec was pretty healthy.
• NVIDIA nForce2 Reference motherboard
• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 reference card (Visiontek/Gateway sample)
• AMD Athlon XP2200+ 1.8GHz Processor
• 512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory (2 modules for TwinBank mode)
• Western Digital WD1200JB 120GB hard drive
• SoundStorm ACR audio board
While I'm not that concerned about not getting shots of the system, after all you will never be able to buy it and the case wasn't the most attractive in the world, I wish I had shots of the SoundStorm since the other nForce2 system I have isn't a SoundStorm setup. By the time I had some digicam skills that were worth showing, the system had gone back to NVIDIA.
Quite a tidy system and one I'm sure a lot of you wouldn't mind owning! Let's take a look at a press shot of the board as shipped to see how an nForce2 board might look.
This wouldn't really cut the mustard as a production board for 2 reasons. Firstly, the 4 mounting holes around the socket area for mounting Alpha or Swiftech heatsinks weren't present. With the chipset targetted at high end systems with support for 333MHz front side bus Athlon XP's, you'd expect to be able to deploy suitably high end cooling solutions.
Secondly is the pesky need for a P4 style power supply for the 4-pin extra ATX supplemental 12V supply. While most if not all ATX PSU's shipping today will have the connector, people upgrading older Athlon systems might not have such a supply. The other nForce2 solution, a production Asus sample, doesn't employ the connector and I don't expect any other nForce2 boards to do the same. Necessary on the reference implementation and that's fine but hopefully not needed on boards from NVIDIA's major partners.
The SPP dominates the top half of the board, in the press shot it's unclothed and rather naked but in the test system it sported a nice heatsink with no fan. No need for active cooling on a high performance chipset is indicative of good engineering, thumbs up to NVIDIA for that.
AGP is present on the huge PCB'd board. While the chipset supports AGP8X, no AGP8X options were present in the BIOS on the test board and plugging an AGP8X compatible card into the slot (Radeon R9700) didn't make the options appear. This was the same in the Asus system. BIOS updates will be needed before AGP8X compatibility appears on nForce2 retail board and they'll hopefully all ship with AGP8X BIOS's. This is probably down to the lack of support from ATI for the 8X and some of the problems which are present. Hopefully this will be resolved soon - we did not have any NVIDIA 8X AGP cards in the labs at time of print, but NVIDIA assures us that the 8X AGP works - we will do some testing when we get the cards in and let you know.
3 DIMM slots for a maximum 1.5GB of system memory, 512MB in each slot. 5 PCI slots and the solitary ACR slot at the bottom of the rather blank PCB for the SoundStorm board. The Asus sports ACR too for SoundStorm board although it shipped without it.
A single Firewire port makes an appearance with header support for another. It was untested but definitely working correctly as far as Windows XP was concerned and I've no reason to doubt otherwise.
Being a non retail design, I wont spend forever talking about it and we'll leave it there as far as the board is concerned.
So that's how NVIDIA did it. Finally in this look at the chipset, we'll take a quick peek at the updated software for the APU which is where all the audio excitement happened.
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